ORBITAL/OPS

Everything
overhead is
catalogued.

Orbital Operations tracks the crowded sky — every working satellite, every dead one, every bolt travelling at eight kilometres a second. The globe behind this text is our board, running live.

The catalogue

Six of forty.

Rest on a row and its orbit lights up on the board. Inclination and period are read from the simulation, not typed into it.

IDObjectINCPeriodStatus
The debris problem
0
TRACKED OBJECTS LARGER THAN 10 CM · AND COUNTING

The cascade. In 1978, Donald Kessler noticed that debris makes debris: every collision produces shrapnel that produces collisions. Beyond a certain density, low orbit becomes a room where the argument feeds itself.

The ledger is the fix. You cannot dodge what you have not counted. Precise catalogues turn a minefield back into traffic — every avoidance manoeuvre starts as a row in a table like ours.